Note the introduction of the [Bindable] above ‘private var myContactsCol:XMLListCollection;’ this tells the Flex components that they can use this variable to listen to changes and to change it’s values.

We start by initializing the application, as we saw in the previous part, but this time we need to check if the XML file already exists in our application storage. And if it doesn’t we need to create it. Note: You’ll notice that we’re referencing the file as app-storage:/data.xml, app-storage is a shortcut that AIR give you to your local storage location on the users machine.

Since the file wasn’t found we’ll create it, we start by creating our base XML object and retrieving a string with xml identation, then we open a File reference to it and finally we write the file using writeUTFBytes that will automatically save our string to the XML file with UTF-8.

Here we have the add and remove item from our collection. So first lets go over adding an item, we essentially need to create an empty node and add it to the xml collection. This can be achieved in a myriad of ways, but I reckon this might be the easiest. Then for the removing part it’s as easy as removing the item that corresponds to the current index of the data grid.

With all the UI elements in place we can now set the two properties we need for the datagrid to work properly, the editable=”true” so that we can edit the contents of each item, and the to set the dataprovider to myContactsCol so that it will bind to it.

Afterward we just have the normal buttons and layout to call the appropriate methods on click and you’re all set.

I hope that this will help you get some insight on how to use Bindings and how to modify and write files using AIR so that you can apply it to your own projects, in the previous part of this article we mentioned the application self update, but since then Adobe has release the air update framework and therefore there’s no longer need to use our own library to achieve a self updating application.

If you have any questions feel free to expose them here and I’ll address them as soon as I can.

Pedro Furtado worked to Ydreams as a Software Engineer and as Senior Flash Developer at Orange8. Focused on the Flash/Flex platform he is always on top on what’s going to happen next. He is specialized in Actionscript, Php, Ruby, Python, Lisp, Flex, Air, overall OO. Now he is a freelance flash platform consultant. You can visit his blogs Dreaming In Flash and DailyPv3D

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